My First Experience with the Magento Ecommerce System

Magento is a relatively new system to the open-source ecommerce world and it's gotten rave reviews from many people. There are several good ecommerce systems such as OSCommerce or Zencart that have been around a long time but suffer from old coding or poor SEO out of the box, so I was very interested in giving Magento a try, as we curently develop almost exclusively for ecommerce with OSCommerce. A good opportunity arose to give Magento a try with a pro-bono client recently, and here's a recap of that experience.

This project needed the ability to easily add downloadable products, offer the ability to upsell on checkout and it neded to easily work with Paypal, which was the client's payment preference. Since OSCommerce downloadable products were not real user-friendly (files have to be manually uploaded via FTP and linked to, which is more complicated than most non-techies want), and I've never been really a big fan of OSCommerce's attribute handling, lack of search engine friendly URLs and no built-in support for upselling, I figured this project wold be the perfect opportunity to give Magento a try. It claims all of these features "out of the box."

So we attempted to install Magento on the client's webhost, which was a cheap shared service (I know, not ideal for ecommerce sites, but this client was on a very tight budget). Well Magento 

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